In the 1930s in Alabama in the USA, the African American ‘Scottsboro boys’ were falsely convicted for supposedly having raped white girls. Only long after the Scottsboro boys had died, authorities admitted the sentences were wrong.
Recently, in Maryland in the USA, two Latin American boys faced similar false accusations, including by new United States President Donald Trump. Fortunately for these two, it looks like they will not get false convictions, annulled only decades after their deaths.
Maryland prosecutors drop false rape charges against immigrant boys witch-hunted by Trump
6 May 2017
The decision by Maryland prosecutors to drop charges against two immigrant youth charged with raping a classmate exposes the Trump administration’s efforts to whip-up a violent anti-immigrant hysteria to advance his plans for mass deportation.
According to the Washington Post, Montgomery County prosecutors dropped the charges because they uncovered evidence proving the alleged victim was not telling the truth.
“The original charges cannot be sustained and prosecution is untenable” because of “substantial inconsistencies,” a prosecutor said.
In March, 18-year-old Henry Sanchez Milian and 17-year-old Jose Montano—both undocumented immigrants—were arrested after a 14-year-old classmate told police and school officials the two boys pushed her into a bathroom, forced her to undress, and assaulted her. Prosecutors announced they would seek life sentences for the two boys, and Montano, a minor, would be tried as an adult. A judge ordered that both be held without bail, ruling that they were “dangerous” and “flight risks.”
Shortly after the boys were charged, officials published details of the young men’s lives, including the fact that they were living in the US without documentation.
The Trump administration threw the full weight of the state against the two boys, amplifying their case as proof that immigrants are “rapists” and “criminals,” as Trump previously claimed.
Just days after their arrest, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers targeted and arrested Montano’s 43-year-old father, Adolfo Sanchez-Reyes, placed him into deportation proceedings, and locked him up in an immigrant detention center.
Press Secretary Sean Spicer announced in a nationally televised press conference: “It’s horrendous and horrible and disgusting what this young woman in Rockville [Maryland] went through.” He said Trump’s mass deportation plan was a priority “because of tragedies like this” and that “immigration pays its toll on our people.”
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said, “As a mother of two daughters and grandmother of four young girls, my heart aches for the young woman and her family at the center of these terrible circumstances.”
Fox News’s Ainsley Earhardt said those who fail to denounce immigrants are “telling our little girls that this little girl’s life doesn’t matter as much as these illegal immigrants’ lives matter because they don’t want to spread a negative story.” A Fox guest said immigrants “are raping and killing our people.” Breitbart featured banner headlines about the “Rockville Rape,” claiming the story “generated national outrage.”
This campaign mobilized extreme-right wing forces and was aimed at sparking acts of violence against immigrants. A spokesman for the school district said he was receiving many phone calls from people who threatened that “they’re going to shoot up the illegals in our school.”
In fact, the boys are innocent. According to prosecutors, text messages sent by the 14-year-old classmate show she planned on having consensual sex with the two boys and had sent them lewd photos. In addition, security video and medical and computer records were inconsistent with the girl’s accusations.
Prosecutors are still charging the boys with possession of child pornography because of the photos the girl voluntarily sent. Andrew Jezic, an attorney for Sanchez-Milian, called the charges “selective prosecution of elective promiscuity,” and said that sending lewd text messages “is hardly uncommon behavior for teenagers.”
The two immigrant youth have spent the last several weeks in jail—a tragic climax of their thousand-mile escape from their violent homelands.
Jose Montano was born in El Salvador, where he was orphaned as a child. He made the journey to the US in roughly August 2016 as an unaccompanied minor, but was stopped at the border. He had been living in the US for just seven months before his arrest. Henry Sanchez Milian is from Guatemala and entered the US also as an unaccompanied minor in July 2016.
The boys were both in ninth grade, likely because they received little formal education in Central America and were held back in the US, where ninth graders are typically 14 years old. Both face likely deportation and now have a drastically reduced likelihood of winning asylum. Lawyers say the two were fleeing persecution at the hands of dangerous drug cartels, which torture and murder thousands and specifically target young men.
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This case is the latest in a string of attempts to whip-up a tough-on-crime fervor against individuals accused of sexual crimes to advance the right-wing political aims of the ruling class. At the New Year 2016 celebration, police in Cologne, Germany claimed immigrant men sexually assaulted “dozens” of German women in an attempt to generate antipathy toward refugees fleeing war in the Middle East.
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